Sometimes you find just what you wanted just a little bit late. This happened with the most recent issue of Arospace Projects Review; it had a big article on the Project Pluto nuclear ramjet cruise missile, with some discussion of early designs including a few lines on a reported North American study from 1947 describing nuclear rockets and ramjets. When the article was published, the North American study was unavailable, and was thought to be likely to be a vague mathematical treatise. However, not long after publishing I came across and photocopied/scanned a copy of that very report. Far from being vague, it was fairly massive and contains detaield engineering schematics of a Mach 3 nuclear ramjet cruise missile, its liquid rocket booster, and what is essentially an enlarged V-2 witha nuclear rocket, capable not only of serving as an ICBM, but also capable of sending a payload onto an interplanetary trajectory.

After sundown, big-ass lamps are turned on at Mt. Rushmore to light up the mountain. I was there at about 7:30 PM this evening… clearly this is the “off season.” It was me, two Japanese chicks and a German family.

On the way from the main facility back to my motel in Hill City, I noticed the “Profile View” viewing area, which got me this:

This was a surprisingly moving experience. Not for patriotic rah-rah reasons, but because there I was on a pitch-black mountainside, with this huge-ass face off in the distance… and not a single sound *at* *all.* It was truly dead silence. No cars, machines, wind, birds, bugs… nothing. It’s been a good long while since I’ve heard silence that complete. And after a brief moment for my eyes to adjust, the night sky was every bit as filled with stars and Milky Way as it is in rural Utah… perhaps more so.

Note: these photos were prepared via the stacking process (ten images each) that I described here. Here are before-and-after detail shots.

In the “basement” of the National Air and Space Museum is what you might call the annex of the NASM’s gift shop. On display in the gift shop is the original filming model of the Starship Enterprise from the original Star Trek TV series. I did a brief walk-around with the camera.

At the Garber facility, in an area not on displey, I found two original filming miniatures for the “Tholian” ships. Sadly, photography was discouraged in this area, as it was a non-public storage and restoration facility, not stuff on display. The models were extremely simple.

<>A common way to get good photos of low-light subjects using digital cameras is via “stacking” the images. The images, if properly overlaid, will line up and the noise will be eventually cancelled out, leaving only signal (the image you were actually after). This process is very common with astrophotography. However, it can also be used with landscapes and other dark, motionless subjects.

The layers need to be stacked atop each other such that they precisely line up. Additionally, the layers need to be set to varying levels of opacity… the background image set to 100% opaque, with the images becoming less opaque as you approach the outermost layers. I use this set of settings:

<>As an example, I took ten photos from the Iowa shore of the Mississippi river, looking into Illinois. A tripod was used to assure that the images would be of a fixed view. They all pretty much look like this:

Oh, goodie! After a century of being “allies,” the French are going after the Brits on military matters. And as seems to be terribly popular in the Old World, they’re still cheesed off about things that happened before Columbus even found the Americas.

To Shakespeare, it was the moment a feckless youth turned into a great king, leading his army to victory against seemingly impossible odds.

But French academics have a very different view of the Battle of Agincourt – claiming that English soldiers acted like ‘war criminals’.

They also accuse King Henry V of giving his permission for captives to be burnt to death and ordering his bodyguards to execute a noble who had surrendered.

…

‘At the very least the English forces acted dishonourably. The Middle Ages were a very violent time, of course, but some might accuse the English of acting like what might now be called war criminals.’

Another rare piece of early Dyna Soar color art. This one shows the Dyna Soar heading to space atop the centaur upper stage of an Atlas booster. And if you think you are seeing corrugations on the back of the spaceplane, you are correct. At this stage in the design process the Dyna Soar *did* […]

So the media is currently ulcerating over Trump suggesting that he’d like to see NFL owners fire players who decide to disrespect the US flag & anthem before games. Here’s the thing: 1: It’s the players right to disrespect the flag, the anthem, the US. 2: It’s any citizens right to say that he’d like […]

Yes, I’ve posted these before. But I feel it’s important for everyone to maintain a proper level of understanding of the encabulator, the turbo-encabulator and the retro-encabulator. And of course once you have an encabulator, you’ll need to diagnose it from time to time: There have of course been advances in the field […]

Argh. Facebook is not my favorite thing. But, apparently, it’s where all the cool kids hang out, so the Aerospace Projects Review Facebook page that I cobbled together years ago, I’ve started posting things in again. One of the weird things about Facebook is that you (apparently) can’t see a page unless you are signed […]

Oh, boy! Mayhem! A Group Of 62 Catholics Has Accused The Pope Of Spreading Heresy Not being Catholic, I have no dog in this fight. Still, it’s always entertaining when religious leaders tell other religious leaders they’re wrong. Wacky hijinks often ensue.

So, Star Trek Discovery plopped onto the airwaves tonight. My review: It was certainly pretty, but all those visuals were spoiled by a whole lot of “WTF am I looking at?” Especially with the “Klingons” who bore almost no relationship to any prior iteration of the Klingons, in biology, aesthetics or culture. Heck, they even […]

… in a drone: This is pretty much exactly the sort of footage that would have been impossible to get prior to the current generation of drones. So just imagine what people will be able to film once the batteries for drones are actually *good,* with the power and energy density of chemical fuels like […]

OK, let’s say your town is plagued by a transdimensional monster that takes the form of a killer psychotic clown. Who would be the best person to try to destroy this menace? That’s right, the goddamn Batman: And because why not: Bill Nye just walked into our elevator while I was snap chatting.. pic.twitter.com/LwCOITAEft […]

A deli worker was attacked, someone came across the counter and slashed at him with a knife. He fought back with a knife of his own, and the other guy got the worse of it. So, what happened? Did the city of New York throw the deli worker a ticker tape parade? Give him the […]